An imaginary vertical plane that passes through a golf ball is known as the impact plane or other suitable appellation. A golfer intending to propel the ball a relatively long distance should swing the club so that his or her hands pass through the impact plane before the clubhead impacts the ball. If the hands trail the clubhead at the moment of impact, or arrive at the plane of impact at the time of impact, the resulting shot will be less satisfactory than it might have been.
An instructor might instruct a student to hold the club so that the clubhead trails the hands through the impact plane, but following such instructions is not easy for most people. Many people feel that their hands are preceding the clubhead through the impact plane even when they are not; accordingly, most attempts to compensate result in overcompensation and the swing of the golfer deteriorates.
Even when a golfer successfully executes a swing with the correct amount of lead, the muscle memory of how the swing was performed is easily lost.
What is needed, then, is a device that holds the golfer's arms and wrists in a preselected position whereby a correct swing can be executed repeatedly until the golfer's muscle memory can be relied upon to produce a proper shot when the device is not used. The prior art does not suggest that such a device should be built, so it does not contain any teachings or suggestions as to how such a device could be built. Accordingly, the teachings that follow were not obvious to those of ordinary skill in this art at the time the present invention was made.